


One Day

by LokianaWinchester



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Angst, M/M, even more sad, suffering!Paul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 20:49:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15251769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokianaWinchester/pseuds/LokianaWinchester
Summary: Sequel to"Words Of Love". I suppose it can be read as a standalone.





	One Day

**Author's Note:**

> Somebody asked about the "One day" at the end of Words of Love, so I wrote a kind of explanatory even more angsty sequel.

He had not seen John in years.

The break-up had been hard on everybody; them, the music industry, the fans. Everybody had needed time to adjust to life without The Beatles.

But at the time it had been the best thing, Paul realised, even though it had hurt so much. For months, almost years afterwards, he had been down. It broke his heart to witness how little his family could comfort him, in other words: how much power John still held over him without even being present.

He found satisfaction in music. So he moved on. Over the years he had tried to move on so often but there was a bond between John and Paul, that he had not been able to put aside during the time when the band had still existed. But now an ocean lay between them most of the time and Paul had a family to help him. He had a wife he adored and he had children.

And so, as the years passed, he got better. He recovered and after some time it did not hurt anymore to hear his name, after some time the questions about their friendship stopped burning his soul, after some time he made peace with the idea of John and him living separate lives; something John seemed to have no difficulty at all with from what Paul could tell, watching snippets of interviews here and there.

He was better now than before, Paul told himself every day, and he was still getting better.

But there came a point when he could not go on avoiding his best friend anymore. They had been so close once and a bond like that, a relationship as they had had did not just go away.

He started to enjoy talking to John again, bit by bit. There were letters, casual, weird. Just like it was John’s style. There were even phone calls occasionally, but those were more exhausting. Seeing John’s handwriting on paper was way less difficult than hearing his voice.

Over the course of the next few years they even saw each other sometimes. Their meetings were never extensive and they were never really alone, just the two of them, but Paul began regaining some sense of how it had been between them and their other correspondences began to flow more easily.

Looking back, Paul could not believe it had taken him ten years to recover from the break-up and yet, here he was on a rainy night in November of 1980, contemplating his relationship with John, while talking to him on the phone. Usually John’s calls were not long. They would just catch up on each other’s lives, before either of them was needed somewhere else. But today they had been talking for over half an hour already. The conversation flowed freely and Paul had the feeling he was back in the fifties, when he had not known John yet.

Getting to know him had been a hard task, you never quite knew where you stood with John, so it was difficult to get closer to him. But in the end that had been what Paul did, even though the process was tiring. John was moody, he rarely opened up to anybody but his mother, he had a lot of issues and insecurities, but still Paul got through to him, they made something work and Paul could not have been more grateful.

Their reacquaintance had taken decidedly more time, given they lived on different continents. But the deciding factor was that this time it was not one of them trying to get the other to let him in, this time it was both of them who had changed, both of them, who deep inside wanted to return to the easy familiarity they had once had. Both of them, who had problems and issues, who were closed off from the other. Both of them had families. Paul was fairly sure John knew whatever they had could not go beyond friendship now. It had been wrong back when it was more than that, but now it was unthinkable, even though sometimes he lay awake in bed, wishing for John’s solid chest to lay his head on, yearning for his fingers to thread through his hair. Sometimes those feelings came bubbling back up but Paul suffocated them, throttled them, killed them off as he was used to doing by now.

“Sean’s doing fine, he’s getting so big,” John said and Paul could hear the fond smile in his voice. He knew the feeling.

“He’s a sweet kid,” Paul agreed. Sean was adorable.

John was quiet for a moment before he changed the topic abruptly.

“Sometimes I wish I could go back, you know. To ’64 or ’63. I don’t even know why, I just wanna sometimes.”

“Me too, Johnny,” Paul said. The nickname escaped him before he could hold it back. “It was easier.” He laughed, lost in memories for a second. “We thought we had it so bad.”

John made a snorting noise in agreement.

“Yeah.” Another pause. Paul was not sure if the connection was still going, but eventually John spoke up again.

“At least we had each other.” Paul nearly did not hear it; John’s voice was quiet, strained.

“I miss you, Paulie.” He had not used that name in a decade. Paul’s heart gave a treacherous thump.

“I’m gonna come home over Christmas, visiting Mimi, y’know,” John continued.

“Oh,” Paul uttered. His throat was closed up with unwanted feelings.

“I could pop by for tea some time,” came John’s voice through the phone. The thought of seeing Joh again after not doing so for several years brought a smile to Paul’s lips.

“Yeah. Yeah, that sounds great,” he said.

Paul vaguely heard another voice from the other end of the line.

“I’ve gotta go, Paul.” John said quietly. It was barely more than a whisper.

“Ok,” he responded.

“I love you. Don’t forget it.”

The line went dead. Paul hung up.

He took a deep breath; John had not sounded like he was joking. He tried to remember the last time he had heard him say these words and needed a second before he remembered that night at the studio. Their last kiss.

It seemed even more surreal now than it had moments afterwards.

‘One day,’ John had said and left before Paul could ask him what he meant.

‘One day I’ll tell you again,’ Paul heard John say in his mind.

‘One day you’ll believe me when I say those words,’ Paul’s imagination now supplied.

‘One day I’ll make you believe them, one day we’ll be together again, one day you’ll return the words again, one day it’ll be ok, Paulie. One day…’

Paul buried his face in his hands and swore quietly, so as not to wake anybody up. He tried to calm his racing mind, before making his way to the bedroom to try and get some sleep; he would have to talk to John when he was here.

Time crept slowly and as November passed and December started, Paul found himself waiting to hear from John. He did not want to seem intrusive by running after him, asking ‘when will you be here, when can I finally see you?’. And on the other hand he was feeling anxious about seeing John again, so he waited.

The phone call left Paul numb. He was not really awake yet and he hoped with all his might that he was dreaming, that this was only a nightmare. A projection of his fear about seeing John again. He needed to wake up, he needed to get away from this horrible place.

But he did not wake up and as more people came, giving their condolences, trying to comfort him. The did not help, they only irritated him. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to be with John.

He lay awake for nights on end, barely ate a thing. He knew Linda was worried about him and he regretted making her feel like this even as he did so, but she knew that John was a big part of his life and she understood his suffering to some degree.

The worst thing was that nobody knew just how deep the pain went, just how gutted he felt, just how awfully lonely he felt despite his loving family and his dearest friends. There was nobody who could share this devastating pain, that came with losing John. Paul lost more than a friend, even more than a lover: he lost his soulmate.

The worst of it passed within weeks. Paul still felt hollow, empty and when Christmas came around, just when he was about to feel better, he remembered John had wanted to visit around Christmas and he felt his fragile house-of-cards world collapse all around him again.

He thought to himself that he was going to be okay eventually. Things would go back to normal, music would stop reminding him of what he had lost and he would be happy again, but the pit he sat in seemed too deep to even try and reach Linda’s outstretched arm that was trying to help.

He had to fight for himself. He had to work at himself in order to get better, but it was not easy, because everything about John was complicated to Paul.

And now ‘One day’ would never come to pass.


End file.
